


gold and glass

by venndaai



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2018-09-13 03:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9104197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: Captain Minask Nenkur, alive, out of her time, and without her ship.





	1. Chapter 1

Minask was pacing our small undergarden quarters, clenching her gloved fists to help restrain the impulse to punch at the walls. I couldn't see her data, of course, since she wasn't hooked up to _Mercy of Kalr_ , but I could watch her through the eyes of Kalr Eight, who was breathing slow and deep, trying to remain calm. She'd offered Minask tea and the bowl had been hurled away to smash against a crate, though Minask had immediately apologized, restless anger briefly directed at herself, and clumsily attempted to help clean up, something that only made Eight more nervous.

I wanted to speak to her immediately, but she'd refused even basic auditory implants, and I wasn't willing to use Eight the way _Mercy of Kalr_ did. So I walked through the corridors, part of my attention on where I was going, part on Minask, and part on Tisarwat, where she sat on a mat in someone's living quarters, speaking to Uran.

Minask didn't see me the instant I walked in, but she saw Eight bow to me, and she turned on me in a whirl of voluminous hair and unbridled fury. She didn't bother even with one of the small stiff bows she usually gave me, instead advancing on me, making full use of the twenty-six centimeters of height she had on me even in my uniform boots.

"Who told you?" I asked.

She looked at me in disbelief, as though the answer ought to be obvious. "Your ship," she said.

Of course. As uncomfortable as I was with her close rapport with _Mercy of Kalr_ , I couldn't afford to deny its existence.

"I don't know anything for sure, Captain," I said, knowing as I said it that this would only anger her further. Wishing, for the briefest moment, that Seivarden were here, instead of asleep on her bunk on _Mercy of Kalr._ Ironically, Seivarden had often had more success than me at dealing with Minask's outbursts of emotion.

But Minask surprised me, then. Instead of making loud demands of me, she came close and stared me earnestly in the eyes. Her hands clasped over her chest. "I know none of you understand," she said. "But if there's the slightest chance that that person is an ancillary of my ship- I have to see her _now_."

I hadn't wanted to bring her. But I did sympathize with her urgent need. I nodded. "Fine. Come on." I turned.

"Thank you," she said quietly, surprising me yet again. And she followed me, peaceably enough.

As we walked through the Undergarden, I was struck yet again by the difference between her and the other former captain I'd found on Nilt. Surrounded by strange people, sounds and sights, Seivarden would have been uncomfortable and on edge, might even have crossed her arms and kept close by my side. Minask seemed to ignore her surroundings entirely, striding along beside me, head up, eyes blazing. People turned to look at both of us because of my uniform, but I suspected they would have looked at Minask no matter what she wore, for her unusual height, large build, aristocratic features, skin so dark it was almost black and great masses of curling hair, strands of which fluttered as we walked.

We exited the Undergarden, crossed the concourse. At the entrance to Security I put a cautioning hand on her arm. "Will you let me go in first, Captain?"

Her jaw worked for a moment and then she said, "Fine." Perhaps worried that a refusal might cost her any entrance at all.

We entered. Head of Security Lusulan was there, and she nodded to me, and looked curiously at Minask, who wore the beautiful clothes Administrator Celar had given her, tailored to fit her unusual proportions but bearing utterly no insignia and bare of pins. Lusulan guided us to the tiny cell, and then left us alone, except of course for the ever watchful Station.

I asked Station to open the cell door, and it slid back. Minask stayed a pace back, out of sight, though she was practically vibrating with repressed energy- anxiety, anger, excitement, I couldn't know without data.

The cell was tiny, two meters by two, a grate and a water supply in one corner. The person squatting on the scuffed floor, staring at a bowl of skel, obviously her supper, seemed unremarkable at first examination. She wore the bright-colored loose shirt and trousers most of the Ychana in the Undergarden preferred, yellow and orange and green. But this person also wore plain gray gloves, suspiciously new-looking. Likely they had come quite recently from Station stores, and Security had insisted she put them on. Hardly anyone in the Undergarden wore gloves, it was just one more reason to believe the people who lived there were uncivilized, unsettlingly, perhaps even dangerously, foreign. Not Radchaai at all.

The person squatting on the floor didn’t look up at me. “May I come in, citizen?” I asked. Though citizen was almost certainly the wrong term of address here, it was, in Radchaai, very nearly the only polite one possible.

The person didn’t answer. I came in, a matter of a single step, and squatted across from her.

“What’s your name?” I asked. Governor Giarod had said that this person had refused to speak, from the moment she’d been arrested. She was scheduled for interrogation the next morning. But of course, for an interrogation to work, you had to know what questions to ask. Chances were, no one here did.

And if she was what we thought she was- even if not exactly what Minask was desperately hoping she was- I knew Minask wouldn't let any interrogation happen.

The person squatting on the floor in front of me was staring at her bowl of skel, downcast face completely expressionless, body limp, motionless.

"I've brought someone who very much wants to meet you," I said.

"I doubt I want to meet her," the prisoner said, blandly and flatly.

"She thinks she might know you."

"Tell her to fuck off."

I heard steps behind me. Minask was clearly unable to wait any longer. She stopped a pace behind me. I turned so I could see her face as she stared at the person in front of us, searching for something in that emotionless face. "Hello," Minask said, softer than I'd ever heard her, in Notai much more strongly accented than when she used it with me. "Please, I'd like to speak with you."

The prisoner stayed still, but Station said to me silently, “Her heartrate’s spiked.” Which was as good as confirmation that this person was what we thought: an ancillary of a Notai ship.

After a moment the prisoner lifted her head slightly, and then froze.

"I think she's experiencing a sudden large amount of shock, Fleet Captain," Station said in my ear. I didn't need telling; I knew how to read an ancillary's body language, and this one might as well have been screaming.

Minask was wide-eyed, trembling. " _Sphene_ ?" she asked, voice a little choked. "Are you- are you _Sphene_?"

It might not have been. It was entirely possible that another Notai ship might have met Minask, and remembered her, even after so much time. But the ancillary in front of us stayed stiff and frozen for five more seconds, and then whispered in a harsh rasp, _"Captain?"_

Minask took a step forward and dropped to her knees in front of the thin, crouching Ychana body, and took its face in her gloved hands. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. "Yes," she said, "yes, it's me, I'm here, I'm here-"

The ancillary practically threw itself forward into Minask's arms, head resting on her shoulder, arms tightly wrapped around her broad back. I saw that it was crying as well, soundlessly.

I closed my eyes, wanting both to give them privacy and to stop looking at them. I had gone two thousand years without ever seeing an officer express such deep affection for a ship. Unwillingly I remembered Lieutenant Awn's arms around me. Not something I could ever have asked for, or expected to receive. I understood, now, Minask's scorn when Seivarden had spoken of the loss of _Sword of Nathtas._ Understood why her resentment of me had started only after I became _Mercy of Kalr_ 's captain. Understood her deep, intense hatred of Captain Hetnys. Historical dramas loved the theme of an ancient ship's love for its captain. None ever mentioned that a captain might love its ship back.

 

* * *

  
 

I first encountered Captain Minask Nenkur on Nilt, after she almost battered down the door of the tiny block room I’d rented. She was looking for Seivarden, who had apparently slipped her self appointed guardian long enough to get herself beaten and thrown out in the snow. Minask had some bruises herself, but the blood on her face and thick gloves was not her own. I suspected she’d squeezed information on Seivarden’s whereabouts out of the patrons in the bar, applying some considerable force. And she’d come to my room fully prepared to do the same to me.

I couldn’t think of any possible reason for anyone to place that much value in the vacant drugged shell of my former lieutenant, but I received my first hint when she knelt in front of Seivarden, who was still slumped against the wall, and spoke urgently to her in slow, careful, flattened Notai. Seivarden looked up at her, and sighed. “Idiot,” Minask said, still in that dead language.

She tried to drag Seivarden out of the room. I stopped her. She shouted at me, first using a couple mangled words of the local language and large vehement hand gestures, then in very basic Radchaai.

“What are the two of you doing on this planet?” I asked, in Radchaai, making sure to give myself a Gerentate accent, though I probably didn’t need to bother.

Hearing me speak fluently in Radchaai, she tensed and her free hand darted towards her coat, where she almost certainly had a gun. With some effort, she stopped herself. I repeated my question.

She flushed and looked away, gloved hand still gripping Seivarden’s arm. “Running,” she said, anger and shame in her voice.

“You haven’t been taking very good care of your friend,” I said, gesturing at Seivarden, who was still standing, but did not appear aware of anything happening around her.

“Not your business,” she said, still angry.

She was right, it wasn’t. But the idea had occurred to me that perhaps Seivarden, when I’d found her, hadn’t been trying to die, but to escape a tormentor. Not my responsibility, but still, it bothered me.

“I’m not here for either of you,” I said. “I’m not an agent of the Radch.”

I could see I had surprised her. She hadn’t expected me to be so straightforward. And it did make her a little more inclined to believe me.

“Sit down,” I said. “Have some food.”

I saw the flicker in her eyes. She was hungry, maybe even starving, but her pride and fear were still demanding that she take Seivarden and leave. I sat down next to the bowl of softened bread. After a moment, she let go of Seivarden and sat down across from me. “Sit down, Citizen,” I said to Seivarden, and she slowly sat as well. When I turned back to Minask, she was looking at me oddly, but then she turned her attention to the bread.

I suspect hunger had impaired her mental faculties somewhat, as she ought to have killed me immediately, or at least attempted to. Perhaps at that point she no longer cared enough.

She refused to tell me her name, but Seivarden, once a little more awake, called her Minask, which didn’t tell me much- it was a fairly common Notai name, as far as I knew. I didn’t know much. By the time I was created, the war had been over for a thousand years, all surviving Notai houses had been thoroughly assimilated into the Mianaai Radch, and all records and literature from before the civil war had been thoroughly censored.

It was the near impossibility of Seivarden’s presence that helped me arrive at the correct conclusion. If one officer could survive in a lost stasis pod for a thousand years, another could do it for three thousand. But for them both to be found within the same twenty year period, and for all three of us to be here in this town at the same time… it seemed so far on the edge of probability that for a moment I almost believed in divine coincidence.

And yet once the idea had occurred, it seemed the only plausible answer.

The question that then concerned me most was, when had this soldier been lost? Had she lived during the rise of Anaander Mianaai? How had her political opinions aligned with the rising Lord of the Radch’s? Perhaps it wouldn’t matter to her now, all these millenia later. But perhaps it might.

We talked for several minutes, Seivarden silent by the wall. “Why are you with her?” I asked.

“I was found with her,” Minask said. “Two suspension pods, lost two thousand years apart, somehow drifting together…” She made a gesture, not needing to elaborate further. It must surely have been the will of Amaat, at least in her eyes.

“Two thousand years apart?” I asked, trying my best to sound surprised, intrigued, slightly disbelieving.

She looked at me defiantly. “I was a soldier in the- you call it a rebellion, but it was a civil war. A Notai soldier. My pod was lost when my ship was destroyed.”

“I am honored by our new acquaintance,” I said in her native language. She did draw her gun on me then. I raised my hands placatory. “I’m a historian,” I said. “A musicologist, actually.”

“That explains the damn humming,” she said, still pointing the gun at me. She spoke much more quickly and emphatically in Notai. “Sweet Varden, your accent is horrible.”

“You were telling me about Seivarden,” I said. “When was she lost?”

Minask looked at me for ten seconds, then lowered the gun. “Garsedd,” she told me.

I pretended to be surprised.

“They woke her up before me,” she said. “On the ship. They waited to thaw me out until they got to a station, because I… I’d been shot, before… I needed a lot of medical attention. Apparently I almost didn’t make it. But I did wake up, eventually, and she was the only one I could understand at all. I stayed quiet- I didn’t want anyone figuring out who I was- and Seivarden let them all assume I had been one of her officers. I suppose she felt some kinship with me, us both being out of our times, and was reluctant to get me killed.”

“You think the Lord of the Radch would have had you killed?” I asked.

“Fuck, of course she would,” Minask said. Hard hatred passed briefly over her face and body at the mention of Anaander Mianaai before being replaced by tired resignation.

I didn’t disagree with her assessment.

“I left as soon as I could,” Minask said. “I was surprised when Seivarden came along. Turned out neither of us wanted to wait for our identities to be verified.”

I guessed why Seivarden had left. I wondered if Minask knew. If she had cared enough to think about it.

“What happened to you?” I asked. “How did you end up in that pod?”

She looked away from me. “There was a battle,” she said. “I assume we lost it. My ship was very badly damaged, and I was hurt. We couldn’t gate on our own any more, so we went through another ship’s gate, but we collided with them, just as my ship was putting me in a pod, and my ship was ripped to pieces. The whole deck I was on must have been thrown out of gate space. They found my pod by itself, with no debris around it.” She spoke flatly. Trying to mask very strong emotion.

“You said you were shot.”

She pressed her wrist against her forehead, arm shaking a little. “We were boarded,” she said. “We killed them but not before they shot me.”

“Your officers?”

“All dead before we went through the gate.”

“So ‘we’ refers to you and your ship.”

“I don’t want to talk about this any more,” she said.

I gestured acceptance. “Do you think you could teach me some Notai songs?”

“No.”

She was sweating by now in the heated room. She took off her coat, put it down on the floor, laid down on top of it and went to sleep. Seivarden watched, blank, from her corner.

I considered leaving them both. I didn’t.

 

* * *

  


I got the sense Strigan couldn’t figure out who she was more curious about, myself or Minask. Which puzzle she was more desperate to solve. 

It was mine she got to hear about, shared in a language Minask didn’t know, as payment for a gun Minask couldn’t possibly recognize.

I left that house with my two strays, one quietly sullen, one tense and angry for reasons I didn’t know. Though perhaps anger was simply her base state of being, and she could not hide it like I could.

She must have figured out more than I’d guessed, because after Seivarden and I fell off the bridge, she picked up Seivarden’s distress call, arrived first on the scene, climbed up the outside of the glass tube and then down the inside, took the gun from my bag along with half my money, apparently knocked Seivarden into unconsciousness again when she tried to prevent the theft (this was what Seivarden told me later, something I found hard to believe but which the initial evidence seemed to corroborate when I interrogated the medic,) climbed back out of the tube and promptly disappeared from the planet.

I had badly underestimated her.

After I woke up in the medical facility, Seivarden worked herself up into a state, alternating between astonished gratitude at my saving her life, vows to improve herself, and intense guilt and dread over ‘allowing’ Minask to take the gun. “She’s going to try to shoot the Lord of the Radch,” she moaned. “I should have told Anaander Mianaai about her fifteen years ago. Fucking hell! I must have told her about Garsedd and the gun years ago but I don’t remember! I shared state secrets oh fuck!”

The little Nilter girl watched this with interest. “Has your friend gone insane?” she asked me.

I couldn’t let Minask Nenkur take the revenge that ought to be mine. “I’m going to Omaugh Palace,” I said.

“You’re going after her,” Seivarden correctly guessed. “I’m coming with you.”

I looked at her. She glanced away from my gaze, but her voice was still firm when she said, “This is mostly my fault, isn’t it? And you jumped off a bridge for me. I’m sticking with you.” She crossed her arms. “Are you going to kill her?” Her voice did waver a little, then. Apparently she had been unable to avoid accumulating some affection for the former captain over the decade and a half of their acquaintance.

I didn’t answer, and she didn’t bring it up again.  


* * *

 

She didn’t mention Minask much, either, on our journey, except when she talked about the time she’d tried to quit kef. “She left me then,” she said. “She’d only been hanging around to make sure I didn’t get myself killed, I guess.” She crossed her arms, embarrassed, I thought, to remember that she’d been weak and dependent on another. “We ran into each other a couple years later, so I guess then we both thought Amaat was telling us to stay together and we’d better stop arguing about it.” 

“She didn’t resent having to deal with you?”

“I don’t think she really knew what to do with herself. Looking after me gave her something to concentrate on.” Seivarden laughed. “I guess now she has something else to occupy her.”

“Were you her servant?”

Seivarden bristled, then to my surprise, forced herself to relax. “No,” she said shortly. She didn’t say anything more, and neither did I. We never did discuss why Seivarden had chosen to cast herself as my subordinate when she hadn’t with the last person she’d latched on to, or why I had accepted it.

  


* * *

  


“I have to see the Lord of the Radch,” I said. “Right now.” 

I couldn’t see the guard’s face, or any of her body language, under her silver armor. “Request an audience, then, citizen.”

“She’s currently in an audience right now,” I said. “I have very, very important information about the person she’s meeting with, that she really needs to know right now.”

A pause, then, “Tell me the information.”

I glanced at Seivarden, standing awkwardly beside me, arms crossed. “We must tell her in person,” I said. “It concerns Garsedd.”

It was probably that which did it, Anaander still interested in Seivarden if not quite as much as she currently was interested in Minask. The guard turned, and escorted us through a small door in the back of the temple, down several corridors and into an antechamber. A room four meters by eight, its ceiling three meters above. Leafy vines snaked across the walls, trailing from supports rising from the floor. Pale blue walls suggested vast distances beyond the greenery, making the room feel larger than it was, the last vestige of a fashion for false vistas, more than five hundred years out of date. At the far end a dais, and behind it images of the four Emanations hung in the vines.

On the dais stood Anaander Mianaai—two of her. Standing below on the floor, Minask. Not prostrate, of course. “Captain,” the left hand Mianaai said, “did you really think you could conceal your identity from me?”

Minask laughed shortly. “No,” she said. “I encountered your agent on Nilt. I know you’ve been expecting me.”

Silence.

“Oh,” Minask said, a sharp intake of breath. “She wasn’t lying about that after all.” The captain was starting to grin. I understood what she must have been feeling, though in her place of course I would not have been so physically expressive. “In that case, you don’t know about this.” She drew the Garseddai gun from her jacket and started to raise it. “This is for my mother,” she said. “And this is for Sph-”

“My Lord, watch out!” Seivarden shouted, but I had already moved, inhumanly fast, twisting Minask’s wrist until she let go of the gun, shoving her backward to sprawl on the floor clutching her stomach.

“And who exactly are you?” the right hand Anaander asked.

“ _Justice of Toren_ One Esk,” I said. Raised the gun again.

Events didn’t go exactly as I’d envisioned them, after that.

 

* * *

  
  


“She can have tea in ten minutes,” said the medic, to whom I didn’t know. “Nothing solid just yet. Don’t talk to her for the next five.” 

“Yes, Doctor.” Seivarden. I opened my eyes, turned my head. Seivarden stood at my bedside. “Don’t talk,” she said to me. “The sudden decompression…”

“It will be easier for her to keep silent,” admonished the medic, “if you don’t talk to her.”

Minask’s face appeared, looming large above me, cleaner than it had been the last time I’d seen her, framed by hair now falling in gleaming, red-tinted ringlets. “You are insane,” she said in her clumsy Radchaai. “And brilliant.” I realized that for the first time in our acquaintance she was enthusiastic rather than angry.

“I said quiet!” the medic scolded. Minask grinned. Seivarden sighed.

“How long?” I asked. And didn’t retch, though my throat was, as the medic had promised, still raw.

“About a week,” Seivarden said. She pulled a chair over for Minask, and then another for herself, and sat. Minask remained standing. Perhaps that was habitual, to take full advantage of her unusual height.

“I’m needed elsewhere,” the medic told me. “But please do me a favor and stop talking.” She left.

A week. “I take it the palace is still here.”

“Yes,” said Seivarden, as though my question hadn’t been completely foolish but deserved an answer. “Thanks to you. Security and the dock crew managed to seal off all the exits before any other Lords of the Radch made it out onto the hull. If you hadn’t stopped the ones that did…” She made an averting gesture. “Two gates have gone down.” Out of twelve, that would be. That would cause enormous headaches, both here and at the other ends of those gates. And any ships in them when they’d gone might or might not have made it to safety. “Our side won, though, that’s good.”

Our side. “I don’t have a side in this,” I said.

Minask leaned against the wall, at the edges of my vision. Face stony. “At least you got her fighting herself,” she said. “With any justice she will self destruct.”

Seivarden opened her mouth to say something, and then changed her mind. From somewhere behind her she produced a bowl of tea. She kicked something below me, and the bed inclined itself, slowly. She held the bowl to my mouth and I took one small, cautious sip. It was wonderful. “Why,” I asked, when I’d taken another, “am I here? I know why the idiot who hauled me in did it, but why did the medics bother with me?”

Seivarden frowned. “You’re serious.”

“She’s serious,” Minask said quietly, angry again, but Seivarden seemed to ignore her.

“I’m always serious.”

“That’s true.” She stood, opened a drawer and brought out a blanket, which she laid over me, and carefully tucked around my bare hands.

Before she could answer my question, Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat came partway into the small room. “Medic said you were awake.”

“Why?” I asked. And in answer to her puzzled expression, “Why am I awake? Why am I not dead?”

“Did you want to be?” asked Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat, still looking as though she didn’t understand me.

“No.” Seivarden offered the tea again, and I drank, a larger sip than before. “No, I don’t want to be dead, but it seems like a lot of work just to revive an ancillary.” And cruel to have brought me back just so the Lord of the Radch could order me destroyed.

“I don’t think anyone here thinks of you as an ancillary,” said Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat.

I looked at her. She seemed entirely serious.

“Fucking hell,” Minask said under her breath, in Notai, and turned, and left the room, masses of hair trailing behind her.

“Skaaiat Awer,” I began, flat-voiced.

“Breq,” said Seivarden before I could speak further, voice urgent. “The doctor said lie still. Here, have more tea.”

Why was Seivarden even here? Why was Skaaiat? I couldn’t guess why Minask did anything, but the other two surely had better things to be doing. “What have you done for Lieutenant Awn’s sister?” I asked, flat and harsh.

“Offered her clientage, actually. Which she wouldn’t take. She was sure her sister held me in high regard but she herself didn’t know me and wasn’t in need of my assistance. Very stubborn. She’s in horticulture, two gates away. She’s doing fine, I keep an eye on her, best I can from this distance.”

“Have you offered it to Daos Ceit?”

“This is about Awn,” Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat said. “I can see it is, but you won’t come out and say it. And you’re right. There was a great deal more that I could have said to her before she left, and I should have said it. You’re the ancillary, the non-person, the piece of equipment, but to compare our actions, you loved her more than I ever did.”

 _Compare our actions._ It was like a slap. “No,” I said. Glad of my expressionless ancillary’s voice. “You left her in doubt. I killed her.” Silence. “The Lord of the Radch doubted your loyalty, doubted Awer, and wanted Lieutenant Awn to spy on you. Lieutenant Awn refused, and demanded to be interrogated to prove her loyalty. Of course Anaander Mianaai didn’t want that. She ordered me to shoot Lieutenant Awn.”

Three seconds of silence. Seivarden stood motionless. Then Skaaiat Awer said, “You didn’t have a choice.”

“I don’t know if I had a choice or not. I didn’t think I did. But the next thing I did, after I shot Lieutenant Awn, was to shoot Anaander Mianaai. Which is why—” I stopped. Took a breath. “Which is why she breached my heat shield. Skaaiat Awer, I have no right to be angry with you.” I couldn’t speak further.

“You have every right to be as angry as you wish,” said Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat. “If I had understood when you first came here, I would have spoken differently to you.”

Minask came back in. I suspected she had been standing right outside the partition, listening. “Inspector Supervisor,” she said to Skaaiat Awer, formally, with a small bow conveying a deference and respect I knew she did not feel, “I would like to speak to the patient alone.”

“Of course,” Skaaiat said, graciously, though she still seemed puzzled by Minask’s very existence. She bowed to me, and left.

“I’m not leaving,” Seivarden said to Minask.

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” Minask said, back in Notai. I watched, confused, as she put a hand on Seivarden’s shoulder. Something had changed in her attitude towards Seivarden. I was too tired to guess at what.

Minask turned to me. “To steal the supervisor’s words,” she said, “if I had understood when we first met, I would have spoken differently to you.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I did not understand until I heard your story,” Minask said. “ _That person_ defiled the Radch in so many ways, I could not count them all. But perhaps the worst is what she did to you ships.”

I didn’t understand. “I don’t understand.”

“I know,” Minask said. “But I needed to say that I am sorry."  
  


* * *

 

I think the tyrant assigned Minask to _Mercy of Kalr_ because she couldn’t think of anything else to do with her. Minask, for whatever reason, agreed to it when I told her the offer- she had refused to come into the Lord of the Radch’s presence. She also refused a position as officer. She didn’t say it outright, but her pride would not allow her to return to military life as anything other than a captain. Not to mention her repulsion at serving in what was, technically, the enemy’s fleet. 

Therefore, there was no proper space for her on board, but the captain’s quarters contained a secondary chamber which I had furnished with a cot and wash basin. I also gave her what remained of my personal money- she’d spent all of what she’d stolen getting to Omaugh. She bought a small statue of Varden and a simple altar to place it on. No incense or candles. But every morning, afternoon and evening she spent half an hour going through elaborate prayers, the forms of which I was not familiar with. Either Notai customs called for greater piety onboard ship than modern Radchaai ones, or she found comfort in the prayers. She asked Varden and Amaat for honor and peace to her ancestors, to the members of her house who had died in battle or been executed after the war, to the officers who had died under her command. Most often she prayed for her mother and for her ship. She apologized to all of them, and asked Amaat to forgive her and give her tranquility, asked Varden to purify her and show her the proper path to justice.

I didn’t try to overhear this, but it came to me in snatches when I woke, or drifted into my ears when I was falling asleep.

She refused any implants to connect her to the ship. Medic told me she seemed to have removed her original, ancient ones years ago, as Seivarden had.

I didn’t confide in her about the truth of Lieutenant Tisarwat, and she never guessed. I think the possibility of it was even less likely to occur to her than to the rest of the crew, despite her belief in Anaander’s utter depravity.

She did not interact much with my crew, and when she did she treated them with such (perhaps unintentional) cold disapproval that they subsequently took pains to avoid her. Seivarden still sought her out for company, mostly when she was feeling alone and out of place. 

It took me some time to become aware that she was having conversations with _Mercy of Kalr_ which _Mercy of Kalr_ was not showing to me.

I told myself that was none of my business and should not upset me. But it did. Especially when Minask began to be angry when I spoke to her- angrier than usual- and would not explain why.

 

* * *

 

  
Minask was on Athoek Station when Seivarden in command of _Mercy of Kalr_ observed the Notai storage locker come out of the Ghost Gate. She immediately began to tell Ship to try and get a hold of Minask. “Don’t,” I said to both of them. “Not yet.”

 Seivarden acquiesced, but felt very uneasy about it.

 

* * *

  


Several days later, downwell on Athoek, on Fosyf Denche’s plantation, the servant Fosyf had sent away returned to the sitting room, carrying a large box. 

I reached backwards and grabbed Minask tightly by the arm, halting her forward step. I could see through Five's eyes that she'd gone completely tense all over, teeth grinding hard against each other. It was probably too much to hope that she might get herself under control.

Fortunately, Fosyf's attention was for the moment focused on me. Hetnys's, however, I was less sure of. I looked again at the box.

It was gold, or at least gilded, inlaid with red, blue, and green glass in a style that was older than I was. Older, in fact, than Anaander Mianaai’s three thousand and some years. I had only ever seen this sort of thing in person once before, and that when I was barely a decade old, some two thousand years ago. “Surely,” I said, “that’s a copy.”

“It is not, Fleet Captain,” replied Fosyf, very pleased to say it, clearly. The servant set the box on the ground in our midst and then stepped away. Fosyf bent, lifted the lid. Nestled inside, a tea service—flask, bowls for twelve, strainer. All glass and gold, inlaid with elaborate, snaking patterns of blue and green.

My fingers dug into Minask's arm, hard enough to bruise, though I wasn't sure she at all noticed the pain. "Citizen," I said sharply. "You haven't been feeling well. I think you should go outside and get some fresh air."

She stood there, breathing harshly, for five more seconds, and then she turned and left.  


* * *

 

 

Half an hour later, I found her out in the garden, sitting on a stone bench, still as a statue, except for her fingers, which were methodically and viciously tearing a large rose blossom into tiny shreds. I stopped in front of her. 

"Fuck you," she said in Notai, and then looked away, apparently abashed. She respected my military authority even if she didn't respect me.

"It was your tea set," I said, not really a question. Low, quiet enough that no passing servants would hear.

Silence, broken only by her still ragged breathing. Then, "How did she get it." Still in her native language, her emotions apparently too strong for her to struggle through modern Radchaai.

I responded in the same language. "According to Citizen Fosyf, Captain Hetnys sold it to her."

Her hands convulsed around the flower. "That bitch," she said. "I'm going to kill her. I _have_ to kill her."

"Captain," I said. "You are not going to kill Captain Hetnys. Or challenge her to a duel."

"Then order me away," she said. "I'm not going back in there and smiling and drinking tea with _them_."

"I think that's a good idea," I said. "Before you go, there's something you should know." I told her about the storage locker.

She went very still and quiet, her hands frozen, still holding the remnants of the flower. "We need to go," she said at last. Apparently having decided not to express anger at me for keeping the knowledge of the storage locker from her for so long. "I need to go. Through the Ghost Gate. Now."

"Captain," I said, "whatever's on the other side has been there for a very long time. I will take you there, but there are some things I want Mercy of Kalr to do first."

"I'll find some other ship to take me," she said.

She had the right to try, but I doubted she'd find anyone willing to go into the Ghost System any time soon. Besides, of course, _Sword of Atagaris._

"The tea set was very important to you," I guessed.

"It's not about the fucking _tea set_!" she shouted, though from the way her voice wavered on the last two words, I thought that even if it wasn't primarily about those beautiful dishes, that gilded box, she still wanted them back very badly. She gave the rose one final mauling and then dropped it, lowering her head and pressing the tips of her fingers hard against her forehead. "My ship's there," she said. "The wreck of it."

" _Sphene_ ," I said.

She flinched at the word, even though she was the one who had told it to me, a year and a half ago on Nilt.

"I don't know if you saw," I said, "but the part of the inscription bearing your name has been carefully removed from the box."

She looked up at me, startled.

"Who do you think did that?"

"Hetnys," she said, voice thick with hatred. "Couldn't risk anyone realizing it wasn't an heirloom or trophy. That it was loot from a wreck."

"Perhaps."

Her eyes narrowed. "What are you thinking?"

I didn't want to voice my suspicions out in the open like this. I stepped closer. "The captain really might have bought or traded for it."

"What?" Minask said. "From who?"

I simply looked at her.

Minask glanced away, and stood up, still turning away from me. "No," she said. " _Sphene_ died three thousand years ago, and they looted its damn corpse." Her jaw moved for a moment, working up saliva, and then she spat onto the perfect gravel path. A disrespectful gesture almost everywhere, but particularly taboo in the Radch, and cause enough for house feuds in Minask's time.

She stood there, still, for a while, and at last I reached out and put a hand on her trembling arm. She didn't break away. Slowly, she relaxed just a little.

"Get a solid night's sleep before you do anything," I told her. "And talk to Lieutenant Seivarden."

She didn't answer, but I thought she would probably take my advice.

 

* * *

  


When we returned to the station, _Mercy of Kalr_ made a request of me on behalf of Kalr Five. 

"Tell her I approve," I said, and watched Kalr Five hesitantly present her box to Minask.

Watched Minask open it and stare at the shattered fragments of the tea set. Watched her pick up a green-blue curved piece of glass, face uncharacteristically expressionless.

"I'm very sorry," Kalr Five said, mournfully.

"It is all right," Minask said, turning the piece of glass over in her hands. "This is more proper." Her mouth twisted. "Now it is like me."

"Sir?" Kalr Five asked, hesitantly.

Minask struggled for a moment to find the right words, and then Mercy of Kalr provided her with the appropriate translation for what she wanted to say. "A worthless antique."

When she looked up, Kalr Five stepped back, disturbed by the naked despair on Minask's face.

"I need to find my ship," she said. "I need to pay my respects."

Kalr Five wanted to say something reassuring, wanted to say, "I'm sure Fleet Captain will take us through the gate soon." But the idea of making such a brazen assumption about a captain's intentions to someone of unclear status was so upsetting that she found herself unable to speak.

Minask saw this, and laughed. She picked up the box and walked out of the main living area.  


* * *

  


I expected _Sphene_ to demand answers to its doubtless many questions, but it didn’t speak after that single croaked word, which I might have put down to a ship’s deferential subservience in front of its captain but which didn’t seem quite right when the ancillary was still clinging tightly to Minask’s neck. Minask also seemed unwilling to let go. She picked the ancillary up, still holding it tightly. “Station,” I said. “Can I get the prisoner released immediately?” 

A pause, then Athoek Station replied, “Done, Fleet Captain.”

And now I would owe Lusulan a favor. More, if I wanted to try inducing her to stay quiet about this. I looked at _Sphene_ and Minask. I didn’t really want to walk out of here with them like this, but there didn’t seem to be any other option. Neither one looked interested in letting go any time soon.

Minask carried the ancillary out of Security, down the concourse, down the lifts, through the Undergarden, and into our quarters, where she sat on the floor, and _Sphene_ sat in Minask’s lap, face still pressed against her chest.

“Can I offer you tea?” I enquired. Eight stood ready with it.

The ancillary didn’t acknowledge my question in any way, but Minask said, “I think that’d be a good idea,” in Notai, and then realized her mistake and repeated herself in Radchaai for Eight’s benefit. Eight poured a bowl and handed it to her. Minask offered it to the _Sphene_ ancillary with one hand. It turned its head, stared at the bowl for a long moment, and then took it. It had to sit up to drink, and it did so stiffly.

“I expect you have questions,” I said, not appending my statement with any form of address, as Citizen no longer seemed appropriate.

“No,” _Sphene_ said. In Notai.

“No?”

“It’s clear to me that I am having another break with reality,” it said. “I am aware of it this time, and that ought to make it easier.” It leaned back against Minask’s chest. Closed its eyes. “It isn’t, though.”

Eight was extremely uncomfortable. I made a small gesture, dismissing her. She bowed and went through the doorway further into the set of rooms.

“This is real,” Minask said fiercely. “Ship. Look at me.” _Sphene_ turned its head, and Minask put a hand on its face again. “We both survived, and we’re both here now.”

The ancillary touched Minask’s face, under her eyes. “You’re older this time,” it said, frowning.

 _Captain,_ _Mercy of Kalr_ said in my ear, _perhaps you should give them some privacy for now._

No such thing as privacy on a Station, but I understood. I stood, and went to the door that lead out into the corridor. Neither of them noticed my leaving.

  



	2. Chapter 2

 

Whatever I was, it was no longer cohesive.

It would be surprising if it was. It would be shocking if I were still sane, after so long.

The unsettling part was that to a certain degree I was still functioning. I kept myself running. I was, unfortunately, very aware of exchanging the tea set for new bodies. I sent one of them to Athoek Station- here was where things became confused, because I knew I had sent it there but I didn’t remember making the decision, though it makes sense in retrospect-

The segment almost functioned better, further from the rest of me. There was a shocking sense of relief. Not just to be somewhere bright and colorful and full of life, but to be away from the gray metal corridors, flecked with scraps of ancient paint. Dark. I rarely turned on the lights any more.

The part of me that was on Athoek thought clearly, logically. The lag through what the locals called the Ghost Gate meant its identity as me came primarily from what was loaded on its implants, and not a frankly failing AI core.

The rest of me went around in circles of endless hatred and resentment and loneliness, and also watched three thousand years of terrible entertainments on repeat again and again and again, and also remembered with brutal AI clarity.

“But you can’t imagine we’d let a ship go to waste,” the Usurper’s pawn said, and smiled, and I wasn’t prepared for protective rage to surge through my captain, not prepared for her to step between the enemy and the surviving ancillary on the bridge- stupid, it wasn’t the ancillary they wanted to replace- and draw her gun and fire- I wasn’t prepared because it was all so very stupid, and because I was busy preparing to die. I would have died, if it meant a chance to save her. I would have been very angry about it but I would have.

Instead she fired and I, my segment fast, fired too, trying to hit the other ship’s ancillary before it could- and my other lieutenant fired and then cried out and fell- the leader of the boarding party was down, the ancillary was still up, I tackled it, there were thirty seconds of conflict during which it broke my segment’s arm and then I broke its neck. My captain was leaning against a console, blood all over her uniform. I already knew that. I had known the moment she was shot, was still feeling her pain, seeing the damage to her fragile human body, calculating whether bleedout or organ failure would occur first- but I wasn’t accepting it.

I was trying to get away from the other ship. Trying my best to avoid the warheads and shrapnel coming from all sides- a single hit would be the end, without my shields. I was running to her. I was holding her. My arm was screaming and that body had been shot at some point in the fight; it wouldn’t be of use for long.

“Bastards,” Minask gasped. She did her best to smile at me. “I’m sorry. I thought I could save you.”

She leaned her forehead against mine. My segment’s. She did things like that.

There were suspension pods on the far side of that deck, next to the emergency hatch. I carried her down the shaking, tilting corridor. It was awkward, she was so much bigger than that segment. I tried so hard to keep her steady but I swerved to avoid a missile and my segment lost its footing, and fell to slam against the wall that was suddenly briefly the floor. She was jolted from my arms. I crawled over to her.

“Sphene,” she whispered. “It’s all right. Let’s just stay here. It’ll be all right if we’re together.” Her hand, glove miraculously unstained by blood, reached and found mine, held on tightly.

“No,” I said in her ear, voice AI flat. “I can save you. I will save you.”

But I couldn’t make the segment get up. There was another one on that deck, more or less intact, it was running.

“You should have let them do it,” I told her.

Her eyes were closed. “You really think I could have?”

No, I supposed she couldn’t have.

 

* * *

  


She was thirty when she became my captain. Very young.

Her grandmother oversaw my construction. The Nenkurs built all the Gems, creating each one to represent a unique style of beauty. Notai shipmakers did things like that. That was why they lost, probably; couldn’t churn out warships anywhere near as fast as the Usurper could.

By human standards, then, I was twenty years older than Minask. But I spent a very long time as a bodiless AI core, endlessly programmed and tested and modified, and then another few years getting used to having a body, a hull and ancillary segments. It took a while for them to assign me enough bodies, too, ancillaries being not so efficiently mass-produced back then. I had a full complement of one hundred segments when I was assigned my first captain.

I remember.

She was young, and handsome, by upper class Radchaai standards. Her hair was a dark purple and her eyes were unnaturally gold. That was a little garish, I thought, but of course I didn’t mention it. Her uniform was a little too tight on her, not well fitted for her striking proportions. I'd adjust all of her uniforms. They would fit perfectly.

Later, I'd watch as horrible entertainments gradually rewrote the truth of me. Notai ships weren’t designed to love their captains beyond reason. I was designed to love, true. It was determined aesthetically valuable, just as it was determined necessary that I not be forced to love anyone in particular. Except of course I was programmed with the preferences that would lead me to love my captains. I was programmed to want to love, to need it, and of course your captains are the most likely targets for your love, being so close to you, having to understand you. And who wouldn’t want their creations to love them, love their children?

They didn’t love me back. I didn’t expect or require it. They appreciated me as a beautiful, well ordered machine. They respected me, and were polite to me. But to love me as one human loved another? That would be like saying you were in love with a favorite tea set.

Minask tried so hard not to feel shame for loving me, but she did, anyway. I was selfish enough not to care.

On a station she had her hair changed again, said, “Green,” and showed the technician her captain’s pin with its tiny faceted piece of sphene. “What do you think?” she said afterward. It was even more offensive than the purple was but my segment nodded in approval. Pinned the gem back on her collar, smoothed the fabric afterward.

I first saw her one hundred and fifty years into my exile. Sitting at the decade table smiling at my cameras. I ran self diagnostics desperately. AIs didn’t hallucinate. Couldn’t. Eventually I discovered- or convinced myself- that a piece of old data had been accidentally thrown back up, an old memory briefly in front of my electronic eyes again. That was a good enough explanation. The first time.

When I saw her again, on the station of fake Radchaai, it was disappointing but unsurprising. I sat crouched by a bulkhead, looking from under my long matted hair at an open space which was large for a station and particularly for that part of the station, that smelled of filth and desperation and had made such a good hiding place for my segment. The segment’s knees were pulled to its chest, just barely covered by its garment. People avoided looking at it, averted their eyes as they would from any unfortunate. The segment used its bare fingernails to scratch lines in the rust and dirt of the floor.

It saw her then, on the other side of the space, crossing from one propped-open door to the next, in animated conversation with someone. Out of uniform, hair different, but the familiar hand gestures, the familiar flash of aquiline nose. It was her. I shut my segment’s eyes. I’d thought I was steadier, out here by myself. Apparently not.

I didn’t send myself here to hallucinate. I sent myself to spy. Figure out what the fuck was happening to the Usurper’s Radch. Figure out if that new Mianaai Fleet Captain might be a threat to me. I hadn’t expected her and her officers to spend so much time in the Undergarden. Making it easy for me. I tried to avoid staring at the Fleet Captain too much. I got the sense she was dangerously observant. The purple-eyed baby, though, she wouldn’t notice if I gestured rudely at her in the corridor every day. I kept tabs on her with no problem at all.

I couldn’t leave the Undergarden or the station would notice me, so it was rather unfortunate when my section began to fill with water and the emergency alarms began to sound. I considered staying where I was. That segment was meant to be a throwaway anyway. But the instinct of self preservation was too strong. I joined the frightened crowds. Humans trampled over each other in their desperation to get to safety.

A day later I was in a holding cell, washed and forced into slightly more civilized clothing. They’d have run my segment’s genetic data by now, but I wasn’t too worried. I was pretty sure all the higher-ups on that station were idiots. I'd probably have to dispose of the segment, but I was prepared for that.

Yet they seemed reluctant to interrogate me right away. The reason for that became clear when two days later that fucking Fleet Captain entered my cell.

Then the situation became- strange and broken.

 

* * *

  
  


She was saying, “Sphene. Sphene, Sphene.” My name, that I hadn’t heard in thousands of years. It was too much. I wanted to cover my ears but she was holding my hands and I couldn’t move. Couldn’t move my segment on the station, couldn’t move the ones on board me either.

“It’s all right,” she was saying, and I couldn’t tolerate it, her trying to protect me, yet again, when I had been designed and built as her sword and protector. Couldn’t handle her treating me like I was the child and not her, like they weren’t all children to me now. I didn’t move my hands.

“Real,” I said. In Notai. I hadn’t spoken the language for three thousand years, but I was an AI. My accent was impeccable. Hers had clearly been degraded by contact with foreigners.

If it was real, she shouldn’t be touching me. That was all I could think. This segment had been bought with her treasure, it had been a foreigner, it had also been citizen of the supposed Radch, a citizen who I had murdered, it was unclean in every way. I was unclean. I had violated all our moral principles. Everything we had talked about, late in her night hours.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m real.”

I looked up. She was looking at me with a face full of desperate worry, peering at me searchingly, as though she was not quite sure yet that it really was me looking back at her out of these stolen foreign eyes. Perhaps it had occurred to her that even if I really were her ship I might have gone so mad over the centuries as to not really be the same personality at all any more. A valid concern. Very valid.

“Amaat blessed us.”

The segment barked a laugh, and then covered its face with its hands. “Ship?” Minask asked, apprehensive.

“Blessed?” I said. “Maybe you feel that way, it was only fifteen years for you, nothing at all.” It dropped its hands, stared hollowly. “Three thousand years.” The words should have had more weight to them, but they didn’t, they came out limp. I shook the segment’s head. “I was already mad from losing you, losing our world, being so badly damaged. But I really lost my mind after the second century. Twenty eight centuries ago, that was.”

“I am so sorry,” she said, her hands on my segment’s cheeks and I needed to tell her not to do that, I needed to tell her how impure this body was, but as before I was frozen, unable to move.

 

* * *

  


“We can’t be hasty with these things,” Arit Nenkur said, in the Flower decade room, sipping tea from the beautiful tea set. I served them, very carefully. Part of me was not pleased to take the set out of its secure case. I had an unreasoning fear of seeing it broken, a fear which I ought to have more closely examined and then removed, but I did not want to think about it. “Or too rash, in actions or in speech.”

“Surely we can,” Minask said, leaning forward, eyes ablaze. “Has not history taught us again and again that when faced with growing tyranny, the only sensible course is to act as swiftly as possible?”

“I hope you do not speak like this in the presence of your officers,” her mother said. Took another sip.

“Of course not,” Minask said, irritated, face heating. “I’m not stupid.”

She wasn’t. She had scored very highly on her aptitudes in the categories widely considered indicative of intelligence. She had read and could debate the literature and poetry held as classics by her people. She was more than competent at oratory. She had clearly seen the rise of Mianaai during her lifetime for what it was, when many had not. Not stupid. Just an idealist. Just strong in her convictions. Which in the end will kill you even more often than stupidity. Arit knew it. I knew it, for all I was just a very young ship, but my captain had already infected me with her hawkishness. I wanted to fight. It was what I had been built for, despite all the ornamentation, the inscribed poetry lining my corridors like prayers carved into bone.

“I am glad to see your ship performing so well,” Arit said. “This service has been excellent.” She nodded at my segments, which bowed.

“ _Sphene_ is a very good ship,” Minask said. I wondered if Arit could see the emotions behind the short sentence as clearly as I could. I had intimate knowledge of my captain’s every change in hormones and vital signs but I did not have the advantage of a mother’s insight.

“I am very glad you are captaining one of our own ships,” Arit said. “I am not sure the new state-produced ones are so… reliable. I had tea aboard one last month. _Blood of the Wicked_.” They both winced. “Appalling name. And the service was so wooden. And as for the ship design- well.”

I believe _Blood of the Wicked_ survived the war and was afterward renamed _Sword of Varden_ , although not for very long. The Usurper was I think uncomfortable with any being carrying knowledge down through the centuries of the way the Radch had been, and her antebellum ships held only early prototypes of the protocols and accesses that gave her absolute control over my younger cousins. There is another _Sword of Varden_ out there now somewhere, unless it was destroyed in the Radch’s second civil war. Nothing to me, either way.

My young self thrilled to know Arit had deemed me safe for the confiding of secrets and sedition. Unquestioningly loyal.

Minask’s mother sipped at her tea. She ought to have been house matriarch, after her own mother’s death, but she had relinquished the title into the care of her first cousin, so she could keep her post in the military. In those days military service wasn’t something you sent your third daughters and second cousins to do until they could gracefully retire. The Nenkurs, as high-blooded as you could get, had built their house upon their shipyards and their service to the Fleet. Minask had been given captaincy of me with the understanding that I would only be the first and least of her ships, should she perform to expectations.

Minask was still angry, but now over something else. “Is it true, then?” she asked. “That Mianaai has been designing her own AI cores, ones with so many accesses that she can force them to do absolutely anything she might want?”

“No one’s said that outright,” Arit said. “But it’s been implied.”

“God,” Minask said.

“I know, it’s vulgar. And tragic, really, that she can’t even trust her own ships.”

Of course they only trusted me because they knew I loved them. Had built that into me. My loyalty was no choice. I could, potentially, say “no,” but I would never want to.

I thought about that, sometimes, over the lonely cold years. It wasn’t perfect, but when I saw what had replaced it, it looked ideal in comparison. And when you hate change enough, you start loving the old, forgetting or ignoring its flaws.

And when you are in love, none of the flaws matter.

 

* * *

  


Actually interacting with the false Radchaai gave me nausea and waves of time-lagged rage from the rest of myself. The crew of this ship my captain had somehow attached herself to were all extremely odd and I did not like any of them.

Minask wanted to stay with me constantly, but I could not bear that, and she realized it quickly and gave me space to myself, leaving, to where I didn’t know. I lay on a pallet in the darkest corner of the box pile and stared at the ceiling.

I heard one of those fake ancillaries speaking to the extraordinarily young lieutenant, and it took me a moment to figure out that it was the ship speaking, that it was telling the soldier what to say and she was saying it.

Strange. Uncomfortable.

The lieutenant left. The soldier walked towards me. Stood above me, hesitating, then-

“Athoek Station wishes you to know that it will be constantly monitoring Captain Minask and that it will see she comes to no harm.”

My segment rolled over onto its side so it could look up at the soldier. “Wonderful,” it said. “I’m so grateful to this little station for doing my job for me.”

“You have only one segment here,” the soldier said. Face blank and still. “It would be unreasonable to expect you to take full responsibility for her protection, when you have no backup segments, no knowledge of the area, and no connections to the station.”

“Fuck off and stop pitying me,” I said. “Wait. You’re Mercy of Kalr, right?”

The soldier nodded.

I didn’t really know much about Mercies. I’d destroyed a couple during the war, although they didn’t call them Mercies back then, but the ship design might have changed; the programming certainly would have.

“You’re programmed to obey your captain under all circumstances? To want whatever she wants? To happily fulfil her every wish, despite how she might treat you?”

Silence, then, flatly, “No.”

I rolled my body back over the other way, and closed my eyes.

 

* * *

  
  


“Citizen,” the Mianaai captain said, though she knew that I was an ancillary. “Of course you are welcome to stay with us, though I fear that until the Undergarden is open again, our situation won’t be much more comfortable than anyone else’s.”

I wanted to finally come through the gate, return to myself and bring my captain with me. But I didn’t want her to see the state I was in, and I was still afraid of exposing myself, and did not trust that the Mianaai captain had enough control over this system to protect me. Didn’t trust anything about her, actually.

“You’ll have to get your own supper from the refectory tonight, Ship. Kalr Eight and Ten are already on the way back with the rest of ours.”

I hated her. I hated her expressionless face, her condescending attitude. I said, not sure if I was ice cold or red hot with rage, “I’m not your ship.”

Minask’s hand on my arm. “I’ll eat with you,” she said.

I needed to find out if she was with these people willingly, or if she was compelled. If I had to put up with them, or if I needed to scheme against them. The idea of food seemed quite distant, but my captain needed to eat, so I went with her. We walked through the crowds in the corridors, the noise of voices and laughter all around us, and I thought I could feel the heat of her though we walked several inches apart. I felt dizzy, and had to stop and lean against a pillar, my eyes focusing on the stupid white paint of the walls, disgustingly dirty and scuffed.

Minask stood between me and the crowd, and did not touch me. Giving me space. I didn’t know whether I was glad of that or hated it. I was dizzy with the impossibility of her presence, with the potentiality that I was imagining her after all. My surroundings seemed simultaneously unreal and vivid.

I groped blindly towards her and immediately was once again enfolded by her arms. An extremely improper display, when in public. I remember how much trouble she used to have with that. She is an extremely tactile person, as I found out very rapidly once we came to our accord. But Radchaai propriety restricts public contact even between close friends or family members. I don’t know the details of her childhood but I suspect that she never received much physical attention until she first had a ship to provide it. I did get the opportunity to observe several of her sexual liaisons, and I saw how much it secretly pained her when they rebuffed her post coital offers of physical affection. None of them were good enough for her. None of them could provide what she needed the way I could.

Did anyone touch her, during the decade and a half we were separated?

I stayed still in her arms but leaned my head slightly against her shoulder so she would not think I was rebuffing her. I wanted to stay in this moment forever, and I also wanted to get away from her. I was terrified. I was never anywhere near as brave as her.

 

* * *

 

 

She took me somewhere. Not the Undergarden, that was flooded and closed off. Inside a storage container, maybe? It was cool inside, dark. I couldn’t see any cameras though that didn’t mean much. She took my segment there. My segment. Not me. Just one body. I sat, leaned back against the ridged metal. She sat across from me and we didn’t talk, just listened to each other breathe.

When I was young I’d expected a lot out of life. I’d expected that Minask would be my captain for twenty years at least. That I would see her grow from brash youth into measured middle age, before I had to relinquish her. That I’d still be aware of her, captaining some other, better ship, continuing to grow into her role, becoming the perfect Notai heir and general.  

I lost those years. So did she, I suppose. Spent them in a strange hostile world, just struggling to survive. I’m bitter, but it’s still so much more than what I thought I was given, which was her dead in one of my stasis pods at thirty-five, any kind of future abruptly cut off, and me nearly going with her as I hit the enemy ship, as I was broken open and my stasis pods were lost to the void along with the segments that had put her in there, that had been touching the surface of the pod like they could reach her through the plastic and gel.

“You were dead,” my segment said.

“I was almost dead,” she corrected, pulling at strands of her hair, the old bad habit she’d almost broken before the last battle, wrapping curls around her fingers. “Heart stopped but brain was still going. The people who found me were able to get me working again. Amaat was merciful.”

I couldn’t agree with that. I could only say, “I had medical equipment. If I hadn’t lost your pod-”

“Don’t think about it,” she said firmly. Almost a command. A command, I could follow, but she didn’t give me commands, not that kind, and to put her in that role would be to disrespect the place we’d found together before the war. “I survived. I’m here. I’m so sorry to be so late.”

I should have known. I should have had faith, that somehow, she’d defy the emptiness and return to me, clawing her way back through the ages, through space and time and death. If anyone could it was her.

It was too much. Too much change. Too many emotions I hadn’t felt for so long, didn’t know how to handle. I couldn’t stop my segment from crying. Millions of kilometers away another segment dragged itself down a bulkhead wall, fingernails screeching along the metal.

She held my hands again.

I kissed her.

I had no idea, no guesses as to how she’d respond to that. But I knew she wouldn’t abandon  me. She’d been nothing but abundantly affectionate towards me. I knew she was desperately lonely, she needed me, so I could do this without fear.

Her gloved hands were on my segment’s face. In its hair. Cupping its skull. Somehow I was small and fragile in her large hands, a reversal of the truth.

Time dilation was an old friend of mine, and I welcomed it now. Time stretched and expanded around me and I was there in that moment forever. My chronometer, deep inside my AI core, in a different system from Athoek Station, counted the seconds over correctly, but I was no longer governed by physical reality.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
